What is AntiSamy .NET?

The OWASP AntiSamy .NET project is a few things. Technically, it is an API for ensuring user-supplied HTML/CSS is in compliance within an application's rules. Another way of saying that could be: It's an API that helps you make sure that clients don't supply malicious cargo code in the HTML they supply for their profile, comments, etc. that gets persisted on the server. The term malicious code in terms of web applications is usually regarded only as JavaScript. Cascading Stylesheets are only considered malicious when they invoke the JavaScript engine. However, there are many situations where "normal" HTML and CSS can be used in a malicious manner.

Philosophically, AntiSamy .NET is a departure from all contemporary security mechanisms. Generally, the security mechanism and user have a communication that is virtually one way, for good reason. Letting the potential attacker know details about the validation is considered unwise as it allows the attacker to "learn" and "recon" the mechanism for weaknesses. These types of information leaks can also hurt in ways you don't expect. A login mechanism that tells the user, "Username invalid" leaks the fact that a user by that name does not exist. A user could use a dictionary or phone book or both to remotely come up with a list of valid usernames. Using this information, an attacker could launch a brute force attack or massive account lock denial-of-service. So, we get that.

Unfortunately, that's just not very usable in this situation. Typical Internet users are largely ineffective when it comes to writing HTML/CSS, so where do they get their HTML from? Usually they copy it from somewhere out on the web. Simply rejecting their input without any clue as to why is jolting and annoying. Annoyed users go somewhere else to do their social networking.

Socioeconomically, AntiSamy .NET is a have-not enabler. Private companies like Google, MySpace, eBay, etc. have come up with proprietary solutions for solving this problem. This introduces two problems. One is that proprietary solutions are not usually all that good, and even if they are, well - naturally they're reluctant to share this hard-earned IP for free. Fortunately, we just don't care. We don't see any reason why only these private companies should have this functionality, so we are releasing this for free.

Downloading

In the future the source code and the compiled .dll can be found at Google Code

Installing

There is no installation needed to get AntiSamy .NET to run. Simply reference the .dll in your code, make sure the dependencies are present, and you are good to go.

Currently, there is only one dependency, HtmlAgilityPack.dll. To run the unit tests, you will also need:

nunit.core.dll

nunit.core.interfaces.dll

nunit.framework.dll

Tailoring the policy file

Smaller organizations may want to deploy AntiSamy in a default configuration, but it's equally likely that a site may want to have strict, business-driven rules for what users can allow. The discussion that decides the tailoring should also consider attack surface - which grows in relative proportion to the policy file.

Running

Using AntiSamy is abnormally easy. Here is an example of invoking AntiSamy with a policy file:

Limitations

No CSS support has been included yet in AntiSamy .NET. It will be added hopefully within the next few months. With the default stylesheet, style tags are not allowed and are stripped out, as is the style attribute.

Update 03/15/2009: CSS support has been implemented in the latest revision (r95) of AntiSamy.NET, and can be checked out from the SVN.

Contacting us

There are two ways of getting information on AntiSamy. The mailing list, and contacting the project lead directly.

OWASP AntiSamy mailing list

The first is the mailing list which is located at https://lists.owasp.org/mailman/listinfo/owasp-antisamy. The list was previously private and the archives have been cleared with the release of version 1.0. We encourage all prospective and current users and bored attackers to join in the conversation. We're happy to brainstorm attack scenarios, discuss regular expressions and help with integration.